In this day and age, it’s hard to find a social media platform that doesn’t collect data on its users. This can be especially true for YouTube. With billions of hours of video uploaded each year, YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the internet. But with popularity comes the problem of privacy. YouTube collects a lot of data about you every time you create a video or comment on someone else’s post. That means YouTube has a lot of information about you that you might not be comfortable sharing with the world.
Here are some simple ways to Protect Your Privacy on YouTube by setting up appropriate settings on your account.
How to Protect Your Privacy on YouTube
1. Hide your watching habits and likes.
If you don’t want others to see What videos you liked and which channels you subscribed to, you can do it by simply ticking few boxes on YouTube. you can do this on both Youtube.com and on your mobile app
How to Hide your video preferences
- Go to Youtube.com or open Youtube app on your mobile phone.
- Tap on your profile photo and tap on “Your channel”.
- Now go to edit channel settings and go to privacy tab and set your subscriptions and playlists private.
So, this is how you can Hide your watching habits private on YouTube and Protect Your Privacy on YouTube.
2. Turn off personalization
YouTube keeps track of the YouTube videos you watch, and it uses that information to deliver personalized ads and recommend the personalized videos on your feed. We have a detailed guide on How to stop youtube recommendations
Deleting your data on YouTube, will not let YouTube see what you like and send you personalized ads.
3. Delete your watch and search history
YouTube keeps track of your history including your search and watches history. You can easily delete your search and watch history on YouTube.
To delete your search and watch history
- Open Youtube.com or Youtube app on your browser
- Tap on your profile picture and go to settings
- Now tap on history and privacy, here you can manage all your YouTube history like clearing your search and watch history, pause watch and search history and more.
- To manage all your data, click on manage all activity tab.
By clicking on manage all your activity, You can see your activity, delete it manually or choose to delete it automatically.
How to auto-delete your search and watch history
YouTube recently started rolling out a new auto-delete activity feature that lets you delete your watch and search history automatically in a span of time. Here is how to set auto delete.
- Once you are in my activity feed, tap on auto delete tab and select the time you want to delete your YouTube activity.
- Once you selected, tap on next and set auto delete.
So, this is how you can control your privacy on YouTube. If you have any suggestions you can always DM us on Twitter ( @vinronco ).